In her image: PhotoEspana 2002 featured an international array of artists chronicling feminine identity in the 20th century - Report From Madrid

Art in America, Nov, 2002 by Richard Vine

For the past five years, the annual Madrid conclave known as PhotoEspana has brought together work by scores of Spanish and international photographers, past and present, for the dual purpose of making the world at large more aware of contemporary photography in Spain and getting the Spanish public more attuned to esthetic currents abroad. The month-long 2002 photo festival and seminar, which opened in mid-June under the artistic direction of independent scholar and curator Oliva Maria Rubio, offered some 60 shows--half at "official" museum, art-center and alternative-space venues, half (the "Festival Off" portion) at privately programmed galleries and cultural sites. Titled "Femeninos" (Femininities), this year's event encompassed photos and videos that focus, according to Rubio's handbook essay, on the issue of "the plurality of feminine identities" and the drastic change in women's roles over the course of the 20th century.

In this, the second of her projected three identity-based directorial efforts for PhotoEspana, Rubio assembled works by 166 artists from 25 countries with the help of dozens of section curators, most notably Italian photo-magazine editor Giovanna Calvenzi and Japanese freelance curator Noriko Fuku. The roundup implied three major conceptual responses to traditional womanhood, roughly corresponding to successive historical phases--let's call them acceptance (turn of the century to 1950), challenge (1960s and '70s) and entitlement (1980s to the present). To judge by the reported attendance of some 400,000 visitors, it was an approach that garnered a broad audience as well as extensive coverage (if not a great deal of serious critical assessment) in the international press.

With its female subjects labeled by profession or, frequently, their mate's occupation ("farmer's wife," "wife of an advanced intellectual"), the show of 180 photographs from August Sander's massive "People of the 20th Century" project (1911-45) might seem to be the most ideologically complacent imaginable. But in fact the exhibition, superbly curated by Gerhard Sander and Susanne Lange, offered a number of cliche-defying insights. First, every subject in the comprehensive social survey, male and female alike, was identified by family or labor role ("mother and son," "innkeeper and wife")--a reminder of the industrial-age tendency to equate self, regardless of gender, with socioeconomic function rather than family lineage or personal history. Second, the range of female roles documented by the German portraitist exceeded the strictures of stereotype, embracing service categories like nurse, secretary, nun, seamstress and actress, but also giving memorable embodiment to power-related designations like "politician," "philosopher" and "revolutionary."

Moreover, anyone interested in the history of gender-bending must relish Sander's sinuous image of Helene Abelen ("wife of a painter")--complete with slicked-back hair, jutting cigarette, man's dress shirt and tie, billowing white pantaloons and slippers. An early modern icon of bohemian liberality, it presages the androgyny and transvestism highlighted repeatedly in "Femeninos" as key strategies of female liberation.

More haunting in their brooding sense of confinement are the historically contemporaneous works of Jose Ortiz Echague. Shot in the 1920s and '30s, the sepia-toned Late Pictorialist images, printed by a direct carbon method on textured paper, depict provincial Spanish women in chadorlike garb and sequestered environments little changed, it appears, since the Middle Ages--or indeed the Moorish occupation. Something of this time-out-of-time quality lingers also in Italian photojournalist Shoba's much more recent series "Sicilian Women" (1980-present), about 20 black-and-white examples of which were displayed in lightboxes in a central subway station. Her images--a young woman in an evening gown, wearing a simpleton's mask; a titularly "serene" woman smoking next to the bust of a courtesan; a black-clad woman kneeling to kiss the face of a man murdered by the Mafia--evoke a world (or at least a region of Italy) where the expectation for women to amuse, to wait and to endure still largely shapes their appearances and acts.

Indeed, a startingly high percentage of the photographers chosen for "Femeninos" examine femininity at its most stereotypical--and not always with a saving irony or criticality. What is one to make, today, of standard-issue midcentury fashion work by Lillian Bassman (longtime art director of Harper's Bazaar) or of Federico Patellani's behind-the-scenes documentation of Italian movie queens and first-round beauty contestants? Spanish favorites though the artists may be, is it really possible to get past the arty lasciviousness of Rafael Navarro's close-up "formalist" studies of the female bodyscape or the forthrightly leering quality of the nudie portraits concocted by Alberto Garcia-Alix? (If you're into large-scale shots of hard-faced, naked babes flaunting their butt holes, Garcia-Alix is your man.)